Companies spend billions of marketing dollars each year to
design memorable ad campaigns. But what does it really take to make
your business's name or message stick in a prospect's mind?
These methods will make your next campaign memorable:

Engage prospects. The more time someone spends with your
ad, the more likely he or she is to remember it. "Vivid
processing leads to better storage of memory," says Elizabeth
F. Loftus, University of California, Irvine, distinguished
professor of psychology, author of 21 books and an expert on memory
malleability. The best ads get the advertiser or brand into the
minds of prospects as they consider different possibilities.

How can you get prospects to spend more time with your ads?
According to Philip W. Sawyer, director of Starch Communications, a
Harrison, New York, testing firm specializing in readership
studies, the most memorable print ads have messages that grab the
reader. Those ads include headlines that contain a benefit and a
strong visual focal point, such as a close-up of a model looking
directly at you. One large photo works best in magazines, while in
newspapers, you can use multiproduct visuals. A Starch
Communications study on behalf of the Newspaper Association of
America showed that when three-quarters of ad space was devoted to
illustrations, recognition rates improved by 50 percent.

Add color and contrast. For magazine readers,
high-contrast images also boost recognition. When Starch
Communications tested two identical ads for Stolichnaya vodka--one
with a white background and another with a black background--twice
as many people remembered seeing the version with the black
background, even though everything else in the ad was the
same.

Testing also shows that, on average, larger ads in print media
are more memorable. However, a creative ad in a small space can be
more memorable than a so-so one that takes up a full page.

Some colors enhance memorability in print media-including sky
blue, golden yellow and shades of blue-green. Red is a good spot
color in newspapers, where Sawyer says color increases recognition
by 20 percent. But there's new information about four-color ads
in magazines: A few years ago, color ads earned 24 percent higher
recognition scores than black-and-white ads. Now, full-page
black-and-white campaigns are breaking through the clutter, and
four-color ads have lost their advantage.

Communicate frequently. Repetition is important to
memorability. At the Washington
University School of Medicine in St. Louis, psychologist Mark
E. Wheeler conducted a study of memory in which a word was paired
with a picture or sound many times over several days to test
subjects' recognition rates. He says exposure to information in
different contexts helps you remember it. So when you see a message
in different formats, such as a print ad, a billboard and a TV
commercial, he says, "You associate the different impressions,
and that helps you retrieve the information when you need
it."

Use memorable benefits. Ads that grab and hold a
prospect's attention are those that immediately communicate a
benefit that answers the question, What's in it for me? The
bottom line, says Sawyer, is that features aren't
memorable-benefits are. "If you have a headline that states a
benefit, people will read it, remember it and clip it out of the
magazine or newspaper and hold onto it. And that's the trump
card for everything."